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The best post by MJ Rosenberg…ever

The latest “IPFriday” from MJ Rosenberg was obviously written in a kind of white heat. It is engagingly furious about the “Status Quo Lobby.” Nobody does fury better than MJ. Here he is on Eric Cantor’s speech at the AIPAC Policy Conference:

The crowd adored Cantor who managed to invoke the Holocaust, gas chambers, and cattle cars in his shameful and hysterical call to arms. Cantor cynically demonstrated that there are indeed limits on how far one may go when exploiting the emotions of a Jewish audience for partisan profit, and then cheerfully crossed them. He literally said that “men are pointing guns at Israel, indeed at Jews everywhere, promising to kill us.”

He said that Ahmadinejad’s goal is not merely building a bomb but “killing all the world’s Jews.” Imagine. An American politician born in 1963 in Richmond, Virginia (last under outside “threat” by the Union Army in the 1860’s) tells a crowd of secure, comfortable Americans that they are in as much physical danger as the Jews of Eastern Europe whose children were slaughtered in front of their eyes-and they cheer! (I’m sure Cantor loves this country but he might want to avoid suggestions that, for Jews, it bears resemblance to Europe in the 1940’s.)

As is often the case with these events that call themselves “pro-Israel,” most of the emotion was produced by contemplating the atrocities of the dead past, rather than celebrating the wonders of Israel’s living present or hopes for its future. For these people, the triumphant Israel of the film “Exodus” has been replaced with the horrors of “Schindler’s List” or “Sophie’s Choice.” (And they wonder why their kids just aren’t so interested!)

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